Edward Snowden made two donations to Ron Paul, who praises NSA whistleblower

In 2012, Snowden reportedly donated $250 to the libertarian Republican’s presidential campaign in March and again in May. Snowden told The Guardian that he voted for a third party candidate in 2008.

The 29-year-old, who worked for the CIA and for an NSA office in Hawaii, openly admitted his role in the leak of NSA surveillance methods. Snowden fled to Hong Kong to avoid prosecution in the United States.

“I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building,” Snowden told The Guardian in his most recent interview.

Paul, for his part, praised Snowden for speaking out and revealing the truth about the government’s intrusion into Americans’ privacy:

“The Fourth Amendment is clear; we should be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, and all warrants must have probable cause. Today the government operates largely in secret, while seeking to know everything about our private lives – without probable cause and without a warrant. The government does not need to know more about what we are doing. We need to know more about what the government is doing. We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk. They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret.”

In Ron Paul’s weekly column, he said that it is no surprise that the government has spied on American citizens. Paul stated that the PATRIOT Act allowed the government to use surveillance on Americans after 9/11, but that the government never went back to the status quo.

When the PATRIOT Act was up for renewal in 2011, Paul made this statement on the House floor:

“If you want to be perfectly safe from child abuse and wife beating, the government could put a camera in every one of our houses and our bedrooms, and maybe there would be somebody made safer this way, but what would you be giving up? Perfect safety is not the purpose of government. What we want from government is to enforce the law to protect our liberties.”